Given all of the above, with the shift from seeing children from an economic asset to a personal choice (simplifying, I know) men and women have to actually like children. It seems to me that this is absent. Children are often either sentimentalised or seen as a drag on ‘self actualisation’.
Children are perceived as ‘expensive’ - all the paraphernalia that it’s assumed you need for babies, then toddlers - when you need none of it.
The toxification of men, the undermining of the male need to be protectors and providers. Women complaining they can’t find a man with whom they can have children and at the same time demanding that men be more like women.
The rise of dogs as substitute babies - I see that all around me.
These are major - not minor - observations. We have gone a very long way down the wrong road in the West over the last 60 years... with our "freedom from" this that and the other....including child rearing. I don't see a way back but maybe that's just an old man talking. But I'm glad for my kids and grandkids. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
” the undermining of the male need to be protectors and providers”
A myth for which there is absolutely no evidence. Just as there is now irrefutable evidence that many women do not have a biological need to have children. As this article has so precisely documented, birthrates are downstream of culture and economics.
“Women complaining they can’t find a man with whom they can have children and at the same time demanding that men be more like women”
One of the hallmarks of human evolution is our adaptability. Expecting that men be both more emotionally intelligent and emotionally available as both partners and parents is not asking them to be more like women. It is asking them to enhance their behavioral repertoire. Raising successful children in our modern economic environment requires significant emotion, intellectual and financial commitments. Until fairly recently, women are socialized from birth to expect to shoulder the emotional and intellectual costs, while men were expected to bear the financial burdens. As women have chosen to enter into the workplace restrictive applications of historical gender norms is maladaptive. Women don’t want men to be like them. They want men to be better.
” the undermining of the male need to be protectors and providers”
A myth for which there is absolutely no evidence. Just as there is now irrefutable evidence that many women do not have a biological need to have children. As this article has so precisely documented, birthrates are downstream of culture and economics.
“Women complaining they can’t find a man with whom they can have children and at the same time demanding that men be more like women”
One of the hallmarks of human evolution is our adaptability. Expecting that men be both more emotionally intelligent and emotionally available as both partners and parents is not asking them to be more like women. It is asking them to enhance their behavioral repertoire. Raising successful children in our modern economic environment requires significant emotion, intellectual and financial commitments. Until fairly recently, women are socialized from birth to expect to shoulder the emotional and intellectual costs, while men were expected to bear the financial burdens. As women have chosen to enter into the workplace restrictive applications of historical gender norms is maladaptive. Women don’t want men to be like them. They want men to be better.
It’s literally unsustainable that in order to maintain our current levels of prosperity we have essentially had to transfer a large proportion of the population from having and raising children to wage labour, to the extent the population faces a collapse. Whilst this has produced the most prosperous society in history and has made numerous women’s lives more fulfilling and independent, a declining population traps us in a cycle of ever increasing dependency, which is extremely difficult to pull out of.
Best case scenario, the one that the techno-utopians dream of, and I think most western governments are simply hoping for, is that AI an robotics massively reduce labour demand whilst bio-tech extends healthy working lives into their 70’s. It’s not really a policy, it’s faith in the coming of technological salvation to resolve the problems they are unable to.
One of the most concerning aspects of the demographic crisis is the inability of democracy to enact self correcting mechanisms. Once an older population has established electoral dominance there seems no way to reverse it other than to allow the system to collapse. We’re like a car with the accelerator stuck and the breaks cut. The only way to stop is to slam into a wall. In a similar way, it feels like the only way intergenerational inequality will end is when governments default on their debts and we can no longer pile anymore bills on the next generation and have to start paying for our own care, because no one will vote to make themselves poorer.
If I were to suggests and solution to the problem, i would say that nothing short of making motherhood a paid role would move the dial now but even a modest sum would be hugely expensive and reduce the tax base. Or we could link retirement age to a generations fertility rate, as it really always should have been, because regardless of how much you save, if you have no labour to take over when you retire, you don’t have a feasible retirement plan, other than forcing other people’s children to pay for it or mass migration.
But as I said, no one will vote for these measures, let alone an aging population unwilling to sacrifice their days in the sun, which leaves us back with technological salvation or economic crash as our only options.
I think this is true and there’s a big part of pronatalism salesmanship in politics that denies tradeoffs and needs to be rebuffed. However, the future belongs to those who show up. Recognizing that even moderate level fertility is really hard to achieve in modern prosperous societies means that we need to consider is there a point where prosperous liberal societies will make those tradeoffs to achieve higher fertility? Because I think you may understate those consequences. Being Japan is a lot harder when you can’t export goods and services to lots of rapidly growing countries around you. Bringing in immigrants is a lot harder when everyone needs immigrants
More and better medical advances keep pushing old age further into the future.
People can easily work until 80 because they are much healthier and more active and energetic than now.
The younger generation is more likely to die earlier than we boomers because their lifestyles are less healthy than ours.
Eventually it might all even itself out with people working and contributing until 80 while still only living until 100 but in much better health so the pension only needs to cover the last 20 years and not the last 40 as is the case now.
More automation should make work easier and less physically damaging.
A fertility crisis spurred on by boomers, who retire in their 50s and 60s. Who tell younger generations that they should be working into their 80s to make up for the fact that the boomers couldn’t be bothered to socially solve this problem themselves. Being long dead before the younger generations realize the raw deal that was left for them. At best leaving a hollow promise that mythical technology will fix what they couldn’t. Truly a geriatric political solution.
As a millennial, I came to terms with never being able to retire years ago. But to see someone try to spin that as somehow a good thing is wild.
This was a great summary. I am always surprised by how many people say that educating women and girls is our way out of the climate/biodiversity crisis, unable to see that countries with the lowest birth rates tend to be wealthier and have much higher resource use.
Is it a given that Gen X and Millennials will see the same long lifespans as that of the Silent Generation? I have read that calorie restriction is associated with longevity, and I am thinking about how different the standard Western diet has become in the past 50 years with people now consuming so much more ultra-processed foods high in salt and fat.
I think the other problem with the low fertility-immigration dependent solution is that it is making the assumption that there will always be an absurdly poorer country to unload their workers into the developed nations. As the past few decades have seen these developing nations improve, this seems to be a very short-sighted solution. Something that will only intensify as those other developing nations start to cut off their own emigration when their own economies begin collapsing from mass migration leaving their own geriatric citizens behind.
While the future of these aging populations will not be pensioners or retirees, it will be pushing those people back into the workforce as the state will no longer be able to maintain their standards of living.
I really hope the liberals find liberal solutions to this problem. Like you said, the real solutions aren't simple technocratic fixes of policy, but deep social changes to how we organize ourselves. All indications seem to point towards the illiberal solutions being the only ones that would actually work. I know how that makes liberal stomachs churn, but if they are stuck in ideas that are bound to radically transform their societies into disaster, then they will need to confront this on their terms before future politicians take advantage of their ineptitude.
I'd recommend looking into Israel though. It seems to be the only developed nation that has bucked the trend to any meaningful degree. That said, there can be countless factors that play into that.
Don't discount advances in medicine and anti-aging technology coming online in the near future.
Cures for Alzheimer's and cancer could well be in the pipeline. With the more back breaking jobs being automated people will be able to carry on working until 75 or 80 quite easily. It is perfectly possible that the retirement age could be 80 within 20 years.
Deafness, cataracts, arthritis could all have been cured or prevented by then.
If the NHS instigated a mutual covenant between each patient and their GP that they must undertake measures to improve their health such as diet, weight loss, exercise, stopping smoking and drinking in moderation or they risk losing their entitlement to free healthcare a great deal could be achieved to slow down decline.
A ban on junk food and tobacco would be a start.
There is also the possibility that the much smaller, younger generations will be unhealthier and will die sooner than their parents and grandparents - this is already happening in some parts of the UK where life expectancy is declining.
There is a real possibility that we boomers will be the last truly healthy, long lived generation.
Then there is the forthcoming increasing automation revolution which will eliminate a great many jobs so we may not need all those extra young workers - especially if the older generation are much fitter and healthier and old age becomes restricted to the decade before death as it used to be in the 1940s and 50s at the dawn of the welfare state.
Great article Pete, an important warning for those of us who do have pro-natalist hopes.
We're not going to see a return to pre-modern fertility levels, short of an equivalent civilisational transformation, but I retain hope a plausible pro-natalist programme might be able to nudge fertility back towards 2, or at least the kind of rates we saw in the 1990s, hardly the Dark Ages.
But as you correctly say, it would have to be a substantial programme far greater on both cultural and economic fronts than the tinkering policy makers have been willing to consider so far.
I wonder how feasible it would be to look at rates of childbearing across religious groups. I'm a Catholic myself and I know one couple with 13 (now adult) children, and many couples with half a dozen or so. We've only got three children so far but we hope for another. I think a similar phenomenon can be seen among Evangelical Protestants and Mormons but I don't know about e.g. Muslims and Hindus.
It sounds like a dreadful simplification but I essentially wonder if religious people having more children now will mean a greater proportion of religious people a generation hence, and if this will mitigate some of the decline in numbers you predict.
Thank you! I wonder if the same stats apply when the believers in question are living in places where their religion is NOT dominant but instead exists as a sort of subculture.
Great article, thanks! I do feel like people who talk about the downsides of reduced fertility are ignoring the enormous downsides of overpopulation that we are all suffering from. Global warming, species going extinct, pollution, etc are all caused by the enormous human population. The human population on the planet will at some point stop growing, either by our choice or forced upon us by violence, starvation, etc. I much prefer it be by choice.
Just pay people what it costs to raise a kid. We spend $40k+ per year per retiree. Spend that much on kids and you will get more kids, don’t yap at me about whether the child tax credit should be $2k or $3k.
Note, it has to be cash. Free daycare means you don’t actually see your kids all day. Why bother having a bunch of kids you don’t see? Give people the money and they can decide whether they want daycare or not.
The problem is that there are countries with massive support for new families already. A year of guaranteed paid time off for both parents can easily score you more than 40K. Not to mention those same countries offering numerous services, benefits, and just giving out supplies for raising kids.
The issue is that this still doesn’t work. Like how Pete put it, this is the normal liberal technocratic solution (have a managed program and give money to fix the problem) that has failed to do anything to solve it. Suggesting the problem is much deeper than just a check, it is a lifestyle and cultural change in how we live that is impacting this more than 0s in a bank account.
Having reached age 65 life expectancy is another 18 years or so, so it’s actually pretty similar.
So no, we haven’t even come remotely close to paying parents a sum close to what it costs to raise a kid. Money has never been tried at a level commensurate with the costs. The most generous countries will give out 5% or 10% of the cost (often with strings) and then people shrug and go “it didn’t work”.
Lifestyle and culture follow incentives. If being a SAHM with five kids meant having a comfortable lifestyle and being able to outbid DINKs for real estate then you would get more of it.
The comparison is more like 40-70% if not more as far as these countries go. States spending ~15k/year on each student, paying for all healthcare costs, paying for food costs, and housing costs/assistance. While the child tax credit is effectively saying you keep thousands of dollars a year, nothing to sneeze at.
While people put in strings because it stops abuses such as not spending it on kids. So you don’t have a mom have 5 kids, take 200k a year, and puts them up with their grandmother while she hits town vacations, making more 40K/year investments.
Once again, it is not a money problem. If this was, that kind of spending would actually dent it, but it just doesn’t. You can’t spend your way into people forming thick intergenerational communities.
They spend 15k/year on the school system. I don't get that money. I don't get to determine how it's spent. I personally value the school system as being worth a lot less than 15k/year to me. I think that assessment is broadly held.
"paying for all healthcare costs, paying for food costs, and housing costs/assistance"
Poor people get those things. Middle class people don't.
Poor people do have higher fertility, and the massive subsidies are probably part of that.
"While people put in strings"
Non-refundable tax credits and similar mechanisms. Its not hard to make it scale with income and not be a welfare program.
I wasn't talking about America, I was talking about the countries that dump the money into helping new parents and families such as Scandinavian or East Asian countries. Where these costs are part of the costs of raising children, even if you don't think it counts for things like education and medicine.
I would also agree with your assessment on the school system, but that is just another problem with the money-solutions. Technocrats try to manage social problems by throwing money at it.
But you do seem to agree with the tax credit approach, which of all the options I find the most reasonable to push. That said, Hungary is the big example of this policy and it has just stalled the decline at best, which also factors in all the other pronatalist policies they put. They still are significantly below what you would need.
I just found this 'stack (via Ed West). Very interesting post. One caveat, though: it may very well be that increased prosperity leads to lower birth rates, but it does not follow that decreasing prosperity will therefore increase birth rates. When was the last time an economic crisis (or more dramatically, a war) increased birth rates? "Never" is probably the answer. It probably works something like this: increasing prosperity is tied with urbanization and a weakening of family ties (and there's a feedback loop there, i.e. it's not simply a matter of one being the cause and the other one an effect). This results in lower birth rates because (as you pointed out) in an urban environment, children are an economic sink, plus there is less extended family support for new parents, which makes child rearing more difficult on every level. Okay, now throw in an economic crisis into the equation. Does this result in urbanization being reversed and family ties reforming? In general, it does not (at least not within the scope of a single generation). It just means that you're an urban dweller with no extended family, and are newly penniless on top of it. That's unlikely to inspire you to reproduce.
I also wouldn't treat increasing life expectancy as a given. It's perfectly possible that it's peaking right around now and is about to reverse. It's already decreasing in the United States, isn't it? Let's see how this plays out globally over the next decade or so.
Maybe. :-) But it seems implicit from what you wrote. For instance: "Scott Galloway has written that ‘globally, the number of people older than 80 is expected to increase sixfold by 2100. Meanwhile, the population of children 5 and younger will get halved.’" I realize you're quoting someone else, but still. Well, I rather doubt that the number of people over 80 will increase like this. I suspect that, instead, life expectancy will decrease. (Why? Because we'll be poorer and therefore unable to keep frail people alive for years as we do now.) This is very difficult to model, of course.
Indeed. Well, I've been told that the point of models is not really to make predictions. If you make a projection based on current trends, and that projection shows something that is patently impossible (for example, 100% of labor being devoted to elder-care), that doesn't mean that the projection is useless. It simply means that current trends will not continue. I think this is worth emphasizing.
ETA: The thing about 100% of labor being devoted to elder-care: I actually read something like that in the UK context (nope, can't find the link now). They were projecting several decades into the future. Well, obviously, this is impossible. Therefore, current trends will not continue. BTW, don't discount the possibility of a baby boom once the Boomers exit the stage and leave a lot of empty housing behind them. 5 children per woman? Highly unlikely. 2.2 though? Not impossible. For a while. To be followed by a baby bust.
Im not sure your analogy works. We know that societies which have undergone the democratic transition are ageing as less people have kids than
hitherto and people live longer than hitherto which means that what Scott Galloway is talking about is a *continuation* of current trends. Whereas your prediction of a baby boom is a reversal of current trends for which there is no evidence for.
Over here in the Czech Republic (which is where I live, as an immigrant), there was a baby boom in the 1970s. Now, don't get me wrong: it wasn't enormous. But for illustration, fertility rate went from 1.957 in 1968 to 2.359 in 1978 (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CZE/czechia/fertility-rate). Not a trivial change. It appears to have been caused by a building boom: young people got apartments essentially for free (this was during socialism, and housing was somehow tied to employment, but the basic point is that housing suddenly became significantly more available for people of prime childbearing age). And then, trends reversed. There was a legit baby bust in the 1990s, which was a time of economic instability. It bottomed out at 1.167 in 1998, and then reversed.
ETA: It's also instructive to compare historical data with projections. Just look at the graph from the link above. Historical data is messy. Birth rates rise and fall without following any particularly pretty curve. But the projection is a nice, smooth curve. But of course, real world data will give you plenty of reversals in the future, just as it did in the past. You may see a long-term trend (with everything averaged out over a century or so), but that's on average. You're likely to see significant short-term reversals, including both baby booms and baby busts.
Fantastic summation.
Some minor observations:
Given all of the above, with the shift from seeing children from an economic asset to a personal choice (simplifying, I know) men and women have to actually like children. It seems to me that this is absent. Children are often either sentimentalised or seen as a drag on ‘self actualisation’.
Children are perceived as ‘expensive’ - all the paraphernalia that it’s assumed you need for babies, then toddlers - when you need none of it.
The toxification of men, the undermining of the male need to be protectors and providers. Women complaining they can’t find a man with whom they can have children and at the same time demanding that men be more like women.
The rise of dogs as substitute babies - I see that all around me.
These are major - not minor - observations. We have gone a very long way down the wrong road in the West over the last 60 years... with our "freedom from" this that and the other....including child rearing. I don't see a way back but maybe that's just an old man talking. But I'm glad for my kids and grandkids. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
” the undermining of the male need to be protectors and providers”
A myth for which there is absolutely no evidence. Just as there is now irrefutable evidence that many women do not have a biological need to have children. As this article has so precisely documented, birthrates are downstream of culture and economics.
“Women complaining they can’t find a man with whom they can have children and at the same time demanding that men be more like women”
One of the hallmarks of human evolution is our adaptability. Expecting that men be both more emotionally intelligent and emotionally available as both partners and parents is not asking them to be more like women. It is asking them to enhance their behavioral repertoire. Raising successful children in our modern economic environment requires significant emotion, intellectual and financial commitments. Until fairly recently, women are socialized from birth to expect to shoulder the emotional and intellectual costs, while men were expected to bear the financial burdens. As women have chosen to enter into the workplace restrictive applications of historical gender norms is maladaptive. Women don’t want men to be like them. They want men to be better.
” the undermining of the male need to be protectors and providers”
A myth for which there is absolutely no evidence. Just as there is now irrefutable evidence that many women do not have a biological need to have children. As this article has so precisely documented, birthrates are downstream of culture and economics.
“Women complaining they can’t find a man with whom they can have children and at the same time demanding that men be more like women”
One of the hallmarks of human evolution is our adaptability. Expecting that men be both more emotionally intelligent and emotionally available as both partners and parents is not asking them to be more like women. It is asking them to enhance their behavioral repertoire. Raising successful children in our modern economic environment requires significant emotion, intellectual and financial commitments. Until fairly recently, women are socialized from birth to expect to shoulder the emotional and intellectual costs, while men were expected to bear the financial burdens. As women have chosen to enter into the workplace restrictive applications of historical gender norms is maladaptive. Women don’t want men to be like them. They want men to be better.
It’s literally unsustainable that in order to maintain our current levels of prosperity we have essentially had to transfer a large proportion of the population from having and raising children to wage labour, to the extent the population faces a collapse. Whilst this has produced the most prosperous society in history and has made numerous women’s lives more fulfilling and independent, a declining population traps us in a cycle of ever increasing dependency, which is extremely difficult to pull out of.
Best case scenario, the one that the techno-utopians dream of, and I think most western governments are simply hoping for, is that AI an robotics massively reduce labour demand whilst bio-tech extends healthy working lives into their 70’s. It’s not really a policy, it’s faith in the coming of technological salvation to resolve the problems they are unable to.
One of the most concerning aspects of the demographic crisis is the inability of democracy to enact self correcting mechanisms. Once an older population has established electoral dominance there seems no way to reverse it other than to allow the system to collapse. We’re like a car with the accelerator stuck and the breaks cut. The only way to stop is to slam into a wall. In a similar way, it feels like the only way intergenerational inequality will end is when governments default on their debts and we can no longer pile anymore bills on the next generation and have to start paying for our own care, because no one will vote to make themselves poorer.
If I were to suggests and solution to the problem, i would say that nothing short of making motherhood a paid role would move the dial now but even a modest sum would be hugely expensive and reduce the tax base. Or we could link retirement age to a generations fertility rate, as it really always should have been, because regardless of how much you save, if you have no labour to take over when you retire, you don’t have a feasible retirement plan, other than forcing other people’s children to pay for it or mass migration.
But as I said, no one will vote for these measures, let alone an aging population unwilling to sacrifice their days in the sun, which leaves us back with technological salvation or economic crash as our only options.
I think this is true and there’s a big part of pronatalism salesmanship in politics that denies tradeoffs and needs to be rebuffed. However, the future belongs to those who show up. Recognizing that even moderate level fertility is really hard to achieve in modern prosperous societies means that we need to consider is there a point where prosperous liberal societies will make those tradeoffs to achieve higher fertility? Because I think you may understate those consequences. Being Japan is a lot harder when you can’t export goods and services to lots of rapidly growing countries around you. Bringing in immigrants is a lot harder when everyone needs immigrants
Or things get better not worse.
More and better medical advances keep pushing old age further into the future.
People can easily work until 80 because they are much healthier and more active and energetic than now.
The younger generation is more likely to die earlier than we boomers because their lifestyles are less healthy than ours.
Eventually it might all even itself out with people working and contributing until 80 while still only living until 100 but in much better health so the pension only needs to cover the last 20 years and not the last 40 as is the case now.
More automation should make work easier and less physically damaging.
It doesn't have to be a disaster.
A very typical Boomer answer tbh.
A fertility crisis spurred on by boomers, who retire in their 50s and 60s. Who tell younger generations that they should be working into their 80s to make up for the fact that the boomers couldn’t be bothered to socially solve this problem themselves. Being long dead before the younger generations realize the raw deal that was left for them. At best leaving a hollow promise that mythical technology will fix what they couldn’t. Truly a geriatric political solution.
As a millennial, I came to terms with never being able to retire years ago. But to see someone try to spin that as somehow a good thing is wild.
This was a great summary. I am always surprised by how many people say that educating women and girls is our way out of the climate/biodiversity crisis, unable to see that countries with the lowest birth rates tend to be wealthier and have much higher resource use.
Is it a given that Gen X and Millennials will see the same long lifespans as that of the Silent Generation? I have read that calorie restriction is associated with longevity, and I am thinking about how different the standard Western diet has become in the past 50 years with people now consuming so much more ultra-processed foods high in salt and fat.
Thank you. I think its likely, yes. But nothing is certain.
Great article.
I think the other problem with the low fertility-immigration dependent solution is that it is making the assumption that there will always be an absurdly poorer country to unload their workers into the developed nations. As the past few decades have seen these developing nations improve, this seems to be a very short-sighted solution. Something that will only intensify as those other developing nations start to cut off their own emigration when their own economies begin collapsing from mass migration leaving their own geriatric citizens behind.
While the future of these aging populations will not be pensioners or retirees, it will be pushing those people back into the workforce as the state will no longer be able to maintain their standards of living.
I really hope the liberals find liberal solutions to this problem. Like you said, the real solutions aren't simple technocratic fixes of policy, but deep social changes to how we organize ourselves. All indications seem to point towards the illiberal solutions being the only ones that would actually work. I know how that makes liberal stomachs churn, but if they are stuck in ideas that are bound to radically transform their societies into disaster, then they will need to confront this on their terms before future politicians take advantage of their ineptitude.
I'd recommend looking into Israel though. It seems to be the only developed nation that has bucked the trend to any meaningful degree. That said, there can be countless factors that play into that.
But would be worth exploring.
Thanks
Absolutely
Don't discount advances in medicine and anti-aging technology coming online in the near future.
Cures for Alzheimer's and cancer could well be in the pipeline. With the more back breaking jobs being automated people will be able to carry on working until 75 or 80 quite easily. It is perfectly possible that the retirement age could be 80 within 20 years.
Deafness, cataracts, arthritis could all have been cured or prevented by then.
If the NHS instigated a mutual covenant between each patient and their GP that they must undertake measures to improve their health such as diet, weight loss, exercise, stopping smoking and drinking in moderation or they risk losing their entitlement to free healthcare a great deal could be achieved to slow down decline.
A ban on junk food and tobacco would be a start.
There is also the possibility that the much smaller, younger generations will be unhealthier and will die sooner than their parents and grandparents - this is already happening in some parts of the UK where life expectancy is declining.
There is a real possibility that we boomers will be the last truly healthy, long lived generation.
Then there is the forthcoming increasing automation revolution which will eliminate a great many jobs so we may not need all those extra young workers - especially if the older generation are much fitter and healthier and old age becomes restricted to the decade before death as it used to be in the 1940s and 50s at the dawn of the welfare state.
Great article Pete, an important warning for those of us who do have pro-natalist hopes.
We're not going to see a return to pre-modern fertility levels, short of an equivalent civilisational transformation, but I retain hope a plausible pro-natalist programme might be able to nudge fertility back towards 2, or at least the kind of rates we saw in the 1990s, hardly the Dark Ages.
But as you correctly say, it would have to be a substantial programme far greater on both cultural and economic fronts than the tinkering policy makers have been willing to consider so far.
Thanks Ste.
I wonder how feasible it would be to look at rates of childbearing across religious groups. I'm a Catholic myself and I know one couple with 13 (now adult) children, and many couples with half a dozen or so. We've only got three children so far but we hope for another. I think a similar phenomenon can be seen among Evangelical Protestants and Mormons but I don't know about e.g. Muslims and Hindus.
It sounds like a dreadful simplification but I essentially wonder if religious people having more children now will mean a greater proportion of religious people a generation hence, and if this will mitigate some of the decline in numbers you predict.
https://x.com/post_liberal/status/1755549783228387499?s=46
Thank you! I wonder if the same stats apply when the believers in question are living in places where their religion is NOT dominant but instead exists as a sort of subculture.
Great article, thanks! I do feel like people who talk about the downsides of reduced fertility are ignoring the enormous downsides of overpopulation that we are all suffering from. Global warming, species going extinct, pollution, etc are all caused by the enormous human population. The human population on the planet will at some point stop growing, either by our choice or forced upon us by violence, starvation, etc. I much prefer it be by choice.
Thank you for reading Tamara and for providing the thoughtful comment in reply
Just pay people what it costs to raise a kid. We spend $40k+ per year per retiree. Spend that much on kids and you will get more kids, don’t yap at me about whether the child tax credit should be $2k or $3k.
Note, it has to be cash. Free daycare means you don’t actually see your kids all day. Why bother having a bunch of kids you don’t see? Give people the money and they can decide whether they want daycare or not.
The problem is that there are countries with massive support for new families already. A year of guaranteed paid time off for both parents can easily score you more than 40K. Not to mention those same countries offering numerous services, benefits, and just giving out supplies for raising kids.
The issue is that this still doesn’t work. Like how Pete put it, this is the normal liberal technocratic solution (have a managed program and give money to fix the problem) that has failed to do anything to solve it. Suggesting the problem is much deeper than just a check, it is a lifestyle and cultural change in how we live that is impacting this more than 0s in a bank account.
40k x 18 years = $720,000
Having reached age 65 life expectancy is another 18 years or so, so it’s actually pretty similar.
So no, we haven’t even come remotely close to paying parents a sum close to what it costs to raise a kid. Money has never been tried at a level commensurate with the costs. The most generous countries will give out 5% or 10% of the cost (often with strings) and then people shrug and go “it didn’t work”.
Lifestyle and culture follow incentives. If being a SAHM with five kids meant having a comfortable lifestyle and being able to outbid DINKs for real estate then you would get more of it.
Ah, I missed the yearly part there.
The comparison is more like 40-70% if not more as far as these countries go. States spending ~15k/year on each student, paying for all healthcare costs, paying for food costs, and housing costs/assistance. While the child tax credit is effectively saying you keep thousands of dollars a year, nothing to sneeze at.
While people put in strings because it stops abuses such as not spending it on kids. So you don’t have a mom have 5 kids, take 200k a year, and puts them up with their grandmother while she hits town vacations, making more 40K/year investments.
Once again, it is not a money problem. If this was, that kind of spending would actually dent it, but it just doesn’t. You can’t spend your way into people forming thick intergenerational communities.
"States spending ~15k/year on each student"
They spend 15k/year on the school system. I don't get that money. I don't get to determine how it's spent. I personally value the school system as being worth a lot less than 15k/year to me. I think that assessment is broadly held.
"paying for all healthcare costs, paying for food costs, and housing costs/assistance"
Poor people get those things. Middle class people don't.
Poor people do have higher fertility, and the massive subsidies are probably part of that.
"While people put in strings"
Non-refundable tax credits and similar mechanisms. Its not hard to make it scale with income and not be a welfare program.
I wasn't talking about America, I was talking about the countries that dump the money into helping new parents and families such as Scandinavian or East Asian countries. Where these costs are part of the costs of raising children, even if you don't think it counts for things like education and medicine.
I would also agree with your assessment on the school system, but that is just another problem with the money-solutions. Technocrats try to manage social problems by throwing money at it.
But you do seem to agree with the tax credit approach, which of all the options I find the most reasonable to push. That said, Hungary is the big example of this policy and it has just stalled the decline at best, which also factors in all the other pronatalist policies they put. They still are significantly below what you would need.
I just found this 'stack (via Ed West). Very interesting post. One caveat, though: it may very well be that increased prosperity leads to lower birth rates, but it does not follow that decreasing prosperity will therefore increase birth rates. When was the last time an economic crisis (or more dramatically, a war) increased birth rates? "Never" is probably the answer. It probably works something like this: increasing prosperity is tied with urbanization and a weakening of family ties (and there's a feedback loop there, i.e. it's not simply a matter of one being the cause and the other one an effect). This results in lower birth rates because (as you pointed out) in an urban environment, children are an economic sink, plus there is less extended family support for new parents, which makes child rearing more difficult on every level. Okay, now throw in an economic crisis into the equation. Does this result in urbanization being reversed and family ties reforming? In general, it does not (at least not within the scope of a single generation). It just means that you're an urban dweller with no extended family, and are newly penniless on top of it. That's unlikely to inspire you to reproduce.
I also wouldn't treat increasing life expectancy as a given. It's perfectly possible that it's peaking right around now and is about to reverse. It's already decreasing in the United States, isn't it? Let's see how this plays out globally over the next decade or so.
I have never argued that decreasing prosperity will increase birth-rates. I have also never argued that increasing life expectancy is a given.
Maybe. :-) But it seems implicit from what you wrote. For instance: "Scott Galloway has written that ‘globally, the number of people older than 80 is expected to increase sixfold by 2100. Meanwhile, the population of children 5 and younger will get halved.’" I realize you're quoting someone else, but still. Well, I rather doubt that the number of people over 80 will increase like this. I suspect that, instead, life expectancy will decrease. (Why? Because we'll be poorer and therefore unable to keep frail people alive for years as we do now.) This is very difficult to model, of course.
These are projections based on current trends. Which is not the same thing as saying that increasing life expectancy is always a given.
Indeed. Well, I've been told that the point of models is not really to make predictions. If you make a projection based on current trends, and that projection shows something that is patently impossible (for example, 100% of labor being devoted to elder-care), that doesn't mean that the projection is useless. It simply means that current trends will not continue. I think this is worth emphasizing.
ETA: The thing about 100% of labor being devoted to elder-care: I actually read something like that in the UK context (nope, can't find the link now). They were projecting several decades into the future. Well, obviously, this is impossible. Therefore, current trends will not continue. BTW, don't discount the possibility of a baby boom once the Boomers exit the stage and leave a lot of empty housing behind them. 5 children per woman? Highly unlikely. 2.2 though? Not impossible. For a while. To be followed by a baby bust.
Im not sure your analogy works. We know that societies which have undergone the democratic transition are ageing as less people have kids than
hitherto and people live longer than hitherto which means that what Scott Galloway is talking about is a *continuation* of current trends. Whereas your prediction of a baby boom is a reversal of current trends for which there is no evidence for.
Over here in the Czech Republic (which is where I live, as an immigrant), there was a baby boom in the 1970s. Now, don't get me wrong: it wasn't enormous. But for illustration, fertility rate went from 1.957 in 1968 to 2.359 in 1978 (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CZE/czechia/fertility-rate). Not a trivial change. It appears to have been caused by a building boom: young people got apartments essentially for free (this was during socialism, and housing was somehow tied to employment, but the basic point is that housing suddenly became significantly more available for people of prime childbearing age). And then, trends reversed. There was a legit baby bust in the 1990s, which was a time of economic instability. It bottomed out at 1.167 in 1998, and then reversed.
ETA: It's also instructive to compare historical data with projections. Just look at the graph from the link above. Historical data is messy. Birth rates rise and fall without following any particularly pretty curve. But the projection is a nice, smooth curve. But of course, real world data will give you plenty of reversals in the future, just as it did in the past. You may see a long-term trend (with everything averaged out over a century or so), but that's on average. You're likely to see significant short-term reversals, including both baby booms and baby busts.